Heather McHugh: One Moment Now: Wordsworthian Swoop and Swoon (July 2001)

While noting that Wordsworth might be the “source of a set of habits” in poetry that have to do with “subordination of fact to feeling…exactitude to exaltitude,” Heather McHugh counters her own skepticism about Wordsworth in this lecture through close readings of several of his poems; she shows how he conveys multiple meanings of the present moment: passage within presence; how, rather than dividing the momentary and the permanent, he manages to see and convey one in the other.